Chapter 1

I AM going to try if I can't write something about myself. My
life has been rather a strange one. It may not seem particularly
useful or respectable; but it has been, in some respects,
adventurous; and that may give it claims to be read, even in the
most prejudiced circles. I am an example of some of the workings
of the social system of this illustrious country on the
individual native, during the early part of the present century;
and, if I may say so without unbecoming vanity, I should like to
quote myself for the edification of my countrymen.

Who am I.

I am remarkably well connected, I can tell you. I came into this
world with the great advantage of having Lady Malkinshaw for a
grandmother, her ladyship's daughter for a mother, and Francis
James Softly, Esq., M. D. (commonly called Doctor Softly), for a
father. I put my father last, because he was not so well
connected as my mother, and my grandmother first, because she was
the most nobly-born person of the three. I have been, am still,
and may continue to be, a Rogue; but I hope I am not abandoned
enough yet to forget the respect that is due to rank. On this
account, I trust, nobody will show such want of regard for my
feelings as to expect me to say much about my mother's brother.
That inhuman person committed an outrage on his family by making
a fortune in the soap and candle trade. I apologize for
mentioning him, even in an accidental way. The fact is, he left
my sister, Annabella, a legacy of rather a peculiar kind, saddled
with certain conditions which indirectly affected me; but this
passage of family history need not be produced just yet. I
apologize a second time for alluding to money matters before it
was absolutely necessary. Let me get back to a pleasing and
reputable subject, by saying a word or two more about my father.

I am rather afraid that Doctor Softly was not a clever medical
man; for in spite of his great connections, he did not get a very
magnificent practice as a physician.

As a general practitioner, he might have bought a comfortable
business, with a house and snug surgery-shop attached; but the
son-in-law of Lady Malkinshaw was obliged to hold up his head,
and set up his carriage, and live in a street near a fashionable
square, and keep an expensive and clumsy footman to answer the
door, instead of a cheap and tidy housemaid. How he managed to
"maintain his position" (that is the right phrase, I think), I
never could tell. His wife did not bring him a farthing. When the
honorable and gallant baronet, her father, died, he left the
widowed Lady Malkinshaw with her worldly affairs in a curiously
involved state. Her son (of whom I feel truly ashamed to be
obliged to speak again so soon) made an effort to extricate his
mother--involved himself in a series of pecuniary disasters,
which commercial people call, I believe, transactions--struggled
for a little while to get out of them in the character of an
independent gentleman--failed--and then spiritlessly availed
himself of the oleaginous refuge of the soap and candle trade.
His mother always looked down upon him after this; but borrowed
money of him also--in order to show, I suppose, that her maternal
interest in her son was not quite extinct. My father tried to
follow her example--in his wife's interests, of course; but the
soap-boiler brutally buttoned up his pockets, and told my father
to go into business for himself. Thus it happened that we were
certainly a poor family, in spite of the fine appearance we made,
the fashionable street we lived in, the neat brougham we kept,
and the clumsy and expensive footman who answered our door.

What was to be done with me in the way of education?

If my father had consulted his means, I should have been sent to
a cheap commercial academy; but he had to consult his
relationship to Lady Malkinshaw; so I was sent to one of the most
fashionable and famous of the great public schools. I will not
mention it by name, because I don't think the masters would be
proud of my connection with it. I ran away three times, and was
flogged three times. I made four aristocratic connections, and
had four pitched battles with them: three thrashed me, and one I
thrashed. I learned to play at cricket, to hate rich people, to
cure warts, to write Latin verses, to swim, to recite speeches,
to cook kidneys on toast, to draw caricatures of the masters, to
construe Greek plays, to black boots, and to receive kicks and
serious advice resignedly. Who will say that the fashionable
public school was of no use to me after that?

After I left school, I had the narrowest escape possible of
intruding myself into another place of accommodation for
distinguished people; in other words, I was very nearly being
sent to college. Fortunately for me, my father lost a lawsuit
just in the nick of time, and was obliged to scrape together
every farthing of available money that he possessed to pay for
the luxury of going to law. If he could have saved his seven
shillings, he would certainly have sent me to scramble for a
place in the pit of the great university theater; but his purse
was empty, and his son was not eligible therefore for admission,
in a gentlemanly capacity, at the doors.

The next thing was to choose a profession.

Here the Doctor was liberality itself, in leaving me to my own
devices. I was of a roving adventurous temperament, and I should
have liked to go into the army. But where was the money to come
from, to pay for my commission? As to enlisting in the ranks, and
working my way up, the social institutions of my country obliged
the grandson of Lady Malkinshaw to begin military life as an
officer and gentleman, or not to begin it at all. The army,
therefore, was out of the question. The Church? Equally out of
the question: since I could not pay for admission to the prepared
place of accommodation for distinguished people, and could not
accept a charitable free pass, in consequence of my high
connections. The Bar? I should be five years getting to it, and
should have to spend two hundred a year in going circuit before I
had earned a farthing. Physic? This really seemed the only
gentlemanly refuge left; and yet, with the knowledge of my
father's experience before me, I was ungrateful enough to feel a
secret dislike for it. It is a degrading confession to make; but
I remember wishing I was not so highly connected, and absolutely
thinking that the life of a commercial traveler would have suited
me exactly, if I had not been a poor g entleman. Driving about
from place to place, living jovially at inns, seeing fresh faces
constantly, and getting money by all this enjoyment, instead of
spending it--what a life for me, if I had been the son of a
haberdasher and the grandson of a groom's widow!

While my father was uncertain what to do with me, a new
profession was suggested by a friend, which I shall repent not
having been allowed to adopt, to the last day of my life. This
friend was an eccentric old gentleman of large property, much
respected in our family. One day, my father, in my presence,
asked his advice about the best manner of starting me in life,
with due credit to my connections and sufficient advantage to
myself.

"Listen to my experience," said our eccentric friend, "and, if
you are a wise man, you will make up your mind as soon as you
have heard me. I have three sons. I brought my eldest son up to
the Church; he is said to be getting on admirably, and he costs
me three hundred a year. I brought my second son up to the Bar;
he is said to be getting on admirably, and he costs me four
hundred a year. I brought my third son up to Quadrilles--he has
married an heiress, and he costs me nothing."

Ah, me! if that worthy sage's advice had only been followed--if I
had been brought up to Quadrilles!--if I had only been cast loose
on the ballrooms of London, to qualify under Hymen, for a golden
degree! Oh! you young ladies with money, I was five feet ten in
my stockings; I was great at small-talk and dancing; I had glossy
whiskers, curling locks, and a rich voice! Ye girls with golden
guineas, ye nymphs with crisp bank-notes, mourn over the husband
you have lost among you--over the Rogue who has broken the laws
which, as the partner of a landed or fund-holding woman, he might
have helped to make on the benches of the British Parliament! Oh!
ye hearths and homes sung about in so many songs--written about
in so many books--shouted about in so many speeches, with
accompaniment of so much loud cheering: what a settler on the
hearth-rug; what a possessor of property; what a bringer-up of a
family, was snatched away from you, when the son of Dr. Softly
was lost to the profession of Quadrilles!

It ended in my resigning myself to the misfortune of being a
doctor.

If I was a very good boy and took pains, and carefully mixed in
the best society, I might hope in the course of years to succeed
to my father's brougham, fashionably-situated house, and clumsy
and expensive footman. There was a prospect for a lad of spirit,
with the blood of the early Malkinshaws (who were Rogues of great
capacity and distinction in the feudal times) coursing
adventurous through every vein! I look back on my career, and
when I remember the patience with which I accepted a medical
destiny, I appear to myself in the light of a hero. Nay, I even
went beyond the passive virtue of accepting my destiny--I
actually studied, I made the acquaintance of the skeleton, I was
on friendly terms with the muscular system, and the mysteries of
Physiology dropped in on me in the kindest manner whenever they
had an evening to spare.

Even this was not the worst of it. I disliked the abstruse
studies of my new profession; but I absolutely hated the diurnal
slavery of qualifying myself, in a social point of view, for
future success in it. My fond medical parent insisted on
introducing me to his whole connection. I went round visiting in
the neat brougham--with a stethoscope and medical review in the
front-pocket, with Doctor Softly by my side, keeping his face
well in view at the window--to canvass for patients, in the
character of my father's hopeful successor. Never have I been so
ill at ease in prison, as I was in that carriage. I have felt
more at home in the dock (such is the natural depravity and
perversity of my disposition) than ever I felt in the
drawing-rooms of my father's distinguished patrons and
respectable friends. Nor did my miseries end with the morning
calls. I was commanded to attend all dinner-parties, and to make
myself agreeable at all balls. The dinners were the worst trial.
Sometimes, indeed, we contrived to get ourselves asked to the
houses of high and mighty entertainers, where we ate the finest
French dishes and drank the oldest vintages, and fortified
ourselves sensibly and snugly in that way against the frigidity
of the company. Of these repasts I have no hard words to say; it
is of the dinners we gave ourselves, and of the dinners which
people in our rank of life gave to us, that I now bitterly
complain.

Have you ever observed the remarkable adherence to set forms of
speech which characterizes the talkers of arrant nonsense!
Precisely the same sheepish following of one given example
distinguishes the ordering of genteel dinners.

When we gave a dinner at home, we had gravy soup, turbot and
lobster-sauce, haunch of mutton, boiled fowls and tongue,
lukewarm oyster-patties and sticky curry for side-dishes; wild
duck, cabinet-pudding, jelly, cream and tartlets. All excellent
things, except when you have to eat them continually. We lived
upon them entirely in the season. Every one of our hospitable
friends gave us a return dinner, which was a perfect copy of
ours--just as ours was a perfect copy of theirs, last year. They
boiled what we boiled, and we roasted what they roasted. We none
of us ever changed the succession of the courses--or made more or
less of them--or altered the position of the fowls opposite the
mistress and the haunch opposite the master. My stomach used to
quail within me, in those times, when the tureen was taken off
and the inevitable gravy-soup smell renewed its daily
acquaintance with my nostrils, and warned me of the persistent
eatable formalities that were certain to follow. I suppose that
honest people, who have known what it is to get no dinner (being
a Rogue, I have myself never wanted for one), have gone through
some very acute suffering under that privation. It may be some
consolation to them to know that, next to absolute starvation,
the same company-dinner, every day, is one of the hardest trials
that assail human endurance. I date my first serious
determination to throw over the medical profession at the
earliest convenient opportunity, from the second season's series
of dinners at which my aspirations, as a rising physician,
unavoidably and regularly condemned me to be present.